Modi and Trump have spoken on the phone “on eight occasions during 2025, covering different aspects of our wide-ranging partnership”, external affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said on Friday.
Lutnick had said that India was given “three Fridays” to clinch a trade deal with Washington last year and that Modi had to call Trump to close it.
The characterisation of the discussions in the reported remarks by Lutnick was “not accurate”, Jaiswal said at a media briefing.
In an interview on the All-In podcast, Lutnick said there had been an expectation that a deal with India would be sealed before those with Vietnam or Indonesia, which were signed in mid-2025. “It’s all set up. You have to have Modi call the President.
They were uncomfortable doing it, so Modi didn’t call,” Lutnick said.
His comments came a day after Trump stepped up the pressure for talks with a warning that the US’ tariffs could rise further to 500% unless India curbed its Russian oil imports. Washington imposed steep 50% tariffs on India in August. Half of that, effective August 27, was a penalty for buying Russian oil.Staircase Approach
The tariffs were slapped even as the two sides were negotiating to close the first tranche of a bilateral trade agreement (BTA) by fall of 2025. After nearly finalising the pact, the trade talks fell apart last year around July.
“We have seen the remarks. India and the US were committed to negotiating a bilateral trade agreement as far back as 13 February last year. Since then, the two sides have held multiple rounds of negotiation to arrive at abalanced and mutually beneficial trade agreement. On several occasions, we have been close to a deal,” Jaiswal said.
“We remain interested in a mutually beneficial trade deal between two complementary economies and look forward to concluding it,” he said.
Lutnick said the UK was the first country to finalise a trade pact with the US, in May, after which the Trump administration adopted a “staircase” approach for trade negotiations, where countries that acted early got a better deal.
“We did Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. We announced a whole bunch of deals in Asia. Because we negotiated them and assumed India was going to be done before them, I negotiated them at a higher rate. So now the problem is the deals came out at a higher rate.
And then India calls back and says, we were ready … I said, ready for what? It was like three weeks ago. Are you ready for the train that left the station three weeks ago,” he said.
Even as India was the first country to launch trade talks with the Trump administration in March, uncertainty regarding finalisation of the deal continues.
India was given what Lutnick described as three Fridays — a “shot clock” to complete negotiations.
While Lutnick acknowledged that a trade deal “will work out”, other countries moved forward to finalise deals with the US, which pushed India further back in the queue. India later sought a tariff rate between Washington’s offers to the UK at 10% and Vietnam at 20% that had formerly been agreed, but the offer has expired, he said.